I watched Star Trek: The Original Series in order; you can too

On this, the 50th anniversary of Ars' favorite (well, almost favorite) TV show, we've decided to resurface this Star Trek
retrospective from a writer who only ever watched the show as an adult.
Whether you're a die-hard junkie or merely watched the Tribbles episode
once on late-night reruns, we hope you'll find something interesting
about the franchise in these year-old words.

Star Trek 50th Anniversary

Here at Ars Technica, we have Star Trek on the brain. A lot. It's a thing most of us have strong opinions
about, and without a physical office, sometimes the IRC watercooler
chat devolves into half-hour-long discussions about the relative merits
of such and such a character. That is, until a senior editor implores us
to write up our thoughts instead of wasting time arguing idly over
chat; we are writers, after all, and writing is what we ought to be
doing during the work day.

I, too, have strong opinions about characters in Star Trek,
but I came at the show from a much different perspective than most of
my peers. My colleagues were astounded when I told them that I'd only
seen one episode of Star Trek as a child (I don't even remember the plot) and my first real exposure had been as an adult, when I watched the entirety of The Original Series and The Next Generation in order, over the course of three years or so.

My colleagues, and in fact almost everyone I meet who I end up talking to about Star Trek,
can't seem to understand why I'd do that. I realized a year ago that
this disbelief comes from the fact that almost everyone who did watch Star Trek as a child watched it syndicated on TV, particularly The Original Series.
While they may have seen all or close-to-all of the episodes in all the
various series, they saw them randomly and sporadically over the course
of an entire childhood, with other shows to fill the space in between.

Not I. Thanks to Netflix, I watched The Original Series over a two-year period, with other shows and movies in between, and I watched The Next Generation in a little under one year as my primary after-work TV. From a modern TV viewer's perspective, the Original Series, with all of its 1960s storytelling quirks and anachronisms, was the hardest entry in Star Trek
canon to get through. That's what I'll focus on here, because talking
about both series from a novice's point of view would make this article
longer than the distance from Earth to the Delta Quadrant.

I'm still working on Deep Space Nine and I haven't even touched Voyager yet, so my view of the Trek
universe is still incomplete, but I've learned a lot about the
franchise by living with it for the last few years. Set your phasers on
"read," because here's how I got into watching my Trek marathon, and here's what I've gotten out of it.

Where no Geuss has gone before

I didn't watch much TV as a kid. I had two Nickelodeon shows—Clarissa Explains It All and Legends of the Hidden Temple—that
I watched religiously, but after my mom got home from work, TV was
pretty much done for the night. In fifth grade, I started watching The Simpsons with my dad, but besides whatever half-hour of crap Fox wedged between the two Simpsons syndicates, that was it.

I never really saw TV as a medium for science
fiction. I read a lot, so I had favorite sci-fi books, but I tended
toward historical fiction. I figured Star Trek for a second-rate TV show revered by the likes of The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy. (Now that I'm older I appreciate the fact that The Simpsons creators were undoubtedly massive Star Trek nerds given the number of references tucked away in there. All that stuff flew right over my 14-year-old head.)

After college and a couple of entry-level reporting jobs, Wired
called me back for a fact-checking internship position. Once I started
working there, I found that the world of sci-fi TV was more than a
punchline. I was good at fact-checking math-heavy articles and I could
bust out a Philip Pullman reference or two, but I had never heard of Dr. Who or Lost (which the magazine was in the middle of putting together a giant feature package on). As I mentioned before, I'd still never even seen a single Star Trek, a cultural touchstone for many of my co-workers.

I looked Star Trek up
on Netflix one night and saw that the canon was huge—way bigger than
I'd expected. “Well, you have to start somewhere,” I thought. “Might as
well start at the very beginning.” I checked out the first DVD.

Beam me up, Netflix!

Enlarge/ Get ready for strange new worlds... that all look like a Los Angeles studio backlot.

CBS

If I recall correctly, the DVDs that Netflix
sent me skipped over the original pilot episode “The Cage” entirely.
Even as a Spock fan, I would have been won over much faster if the Enterprise's
first officer was played by Majel Barrett-Roddenberry as in that
pilot—she deserved to be so much more than just Nurse Chapel! That left
me with the as-aired pilot “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” “The
Corbomite Maneuver,” and “Mudd's Women.” I started watching about one or
two DVDs a week when I had time for TV after work, usually while
folding laundry or doing some other menial task.

The pacing

You would think that for someone whose only
exposure to TV has been 26-minute comedy cartoons, I would have bowed
out of this project by the second exceedingly-long staged fight sequence.
But I also cut my entertainment teeth on long and sometimes old books.
I've learned over the years that sometimes you have to slog through 200,
or 300, or sometimes even 400 pages (or minutes?) of tedium before you
get to the payoff. Then, once you've proven that your heart is pure and
your soul is willing, you get the special reward that everyone who left
the race early won't get.

I approached The Original Series
the same way. Every episode was a challenge, sometimes just to see if
you were still awake at the end. You'd be rewarded with a particularly
engaging plot line here and there, but the real reward didn't come until
the second season, when I started to feel like I was on the inside of
some hilarious joke. Maybe I cracked? Maybe it was Stockholm Syndrome?
By this time, I had left my job at Wired and moved on to other things. I had no external push to keep watching. And yet, there I was.

After a while, it was like the same crazy
hand-to-hand combat moves, cookie-cutter planet landscapes, and terrible
setups to get the characters back in time were not just jokes that
modern me could laugh and gawk at as much as they were clues to
understanding a very, very different world. And I'm not talking just
about the Federation—I'm talking about the real-life generation
immediately before mine, too.

The women

Speaking of a different world, there was one big barrier to entry into TOS:
its ladies. I'm still not quite sure how to deal with the way women
were treated in the show. I've found that when watching many movies or
shows from the '60s and '70s, it's incredibly hard to relate the
characters—not just because plot pacing was slower and diction was
different than it is on TV today, but because I'm almost guaranteed to
be disappointed by the way the story treats women. Generally, one just
has to accept that there is going to be out-and-out sexism in a lot of
old movies and TV, and you can either toss out the whole thing or watch
it from afar like you're in a museum, analyzing an ancient culture.

Enlarge/ Uhura's character was a breath of fresh air in the Original Series world.

CBS

At the beginning, this is how I approached The Original Series. Despite how much everyone wants to talk about Star Trek's
progressiveness in 1966, you can tell just by a quick glance at the
costuming that womankind is not going to be treated as equal, with all
the rights and responsibilities pertaining thereto.

But around the end of season one, I couldn't
help but become a little bit invested in the world of the Federation. I
was always happy when Lieutenant Uhura was given real lines in an
episode, because she was just what you'd want in a starship officer of
the future—brave and serious, but with a human side, too. Nurse Chapel
was also welcome—she had gravitas without being robotic and cold.

I watched Star Trek: The Original Series in order; you can too
Reviewed by Chidinma C Amadi
on
11:28 PM
Rating: 5